[X4U] Drawing tablet recommendations?

[John Richardson]

Hello,

If you are tracing, then it is possible that you could justify a honkin big
tablet.

However, a small tablet will do. Then you could take the saved money, buy a
3-D modeling program or a CAD program that takes scanned images or vector
files and exports/imports to your final application. There may be a multiple
export/import pipeline involved.

Small tablet -- I don't pretend to be an artist. However, I suspect that a
2X3 tablet (if one exists) is fine for an artist.
Reason: An artist just looks at the screen while moving the pen...so the
tablet size really is most likely determined by the length of the average
brush stroke. So, being a non artist, I find that I'm just filling in
photoshop images and so my stroke length is fine for the inexpensive 4X5.

Tracing -- It has been a while since I used Illustrator (Photoshop 7 /
Illustrator 10/11 or the suite before CS1) so if you have that suite or
better, you may have some sort of tracing import function already (from
scanned bitmap that has been vectorized by an application, possibly
Illustrator itself).

Aspect ratio -- From the above, the process is "relative". But since I'm not
an artist, I can't guarantee this. So, this may be the wrong question.

Lastly -- Adobe has forums like X4U specifically for Photoshop and
Illustrator,... Once you get done with this thread, switch to the adobe
forum of interest and finish up you evaluation. I bought my wacom 4X5 after
talking to an artist in the adobe booth at macworld a few years ago. For the
"just a companion tool for a stick figure artist" user it is fine.

I'm still waiting to win wacom's top of the line touch screen, hold you hand
and make masterpieces for you system at Macworld or Siggraph.

John F. Richardson

-----Original Message-----
From: x4u-bounces at listserver.themacintoshguy.com
[mailto:x4u-bounces at listserver.themacintoshguy.com] On Behalf Of Jim
Robertson
Sent: Saturday, November 11, 2006 3:52 PM
To: Mac-L list; Mac OS Digest
Subject: [X4U] Drawing tablet recommendations?

I'm considering buying a Wacom tablet for use with Photoshop. Anyone have
opinions regarding the advantages of the Intuos vs. Graphire tablets?

Early drawing tablets used to have a transparent layer under which one could
place a piece of art to be traced or copied using the drawing tools. Do
current tablets still have these?

How does the tablet deal with the fact that I have an extended desktop
(Apple 17 inch LCD and Dell 2405 - the latter is my main display and has a
"wide" aspect ratio). Does the Wacom tablet map to a portion of this screen
since its aspect ratio is different?

Thanks for any info...

Jim Robertson
-- 



_______________________________________________
X4U mailing list
X4U at listserver.themacintoshguy.com
http://listserver.themacintoshguy.com/mailman/listinfo/x4u

Listmom is trying to clean out his closets! Vintage Mac and random stuff:
         http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZmacguy1984